Construction spending on manufacturing facilities is slightly down vs six months ago. Not up. And it takes many years to move supply chains at scale.

Construction spending on manufacturing facilities isn’t up this year. There’s a whole host of reasons why manufacturing isn’t big in this country. So, for the most part it’s just a tax on something that, at best, can change *very* slowly.

Effective marketing.

I mean, I do this for a living and looked at the data. Consumers and businesses are currently splitting most of it. Import prices aren’t down at all. Also if you ask most AI models “based on as broad analysis as possible, who is paying the bulk of the tariffs: us consumers, us businesses, or foreign exporters?” it’ll tell you mostly the first two. But happy to see your counterpoints.

Aggregate import prices (which are measured pre tariffs) aren’t down at all.

Federal spending is up. So there is a pretty big focus on generating new revenue to pay for it. Most analysis so far shows that tariffs are being paid primarily by U.S. consumers and U.S. businesses. The foreign share (in the form of price cuts) is pretty low. One of the impressive things about Trump is that he managed to convince a nontrivial percentage of conservatives to cheer for higher spending and new taxes to pay for it.

For context, that’s twice the average annual return of the stock market, a little over half the way in. And that’s after something like a 130% gain in 2024. It’s not a raging bull market, no. I’d love to see some random god candle up to $150k. But for an asset as big as a mag7 stock to be up this much isn’t bad at all.

It's a healthy bull market, imo. And now that bitcoin is a $2T+ network, it's normal for it to move like a more liquid asset should. And it's still up like 8x from the 2022 low. The S&P 500 is up less than 2x.

I ran the first chapter of my fiction writing through some AI tool out of curiosity to see if it could give me any tips, and it was like, "you could use more inclusive language than 'manhunt'" so I was like, "nevermind, this was a horrible decision, back to my human editor."

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

Well, a decent chunk of my posts over the past year have been about narrative structure in fiction, book reviews, and stuff like that.

With every year that goes by, I’m kind of low-key surprised that North Korea is still a thing. Third generation dictator, hasn’t been revolution’ed yet, basically the most closed out country in the world.

My accountant going through my Nostr zaps like

I’ve crossed 100k followers. So, I want to give a heartfelt thanks to all the bots that made that possible. 😂

Well put.

Notably, Egypt has recurring summertime electricity shortages, and despite being literally in the Sahara desert has been unsuccessfully trying to substantially increase its solar energy production. Solar power and storage is often not the super-cheap sustainable panacea that theory-crafters make it out to be. https://worldsustainabilitycollective.com/why-has-egypts-solar-policy-failed/ https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/09/01/why-egypts-plans-for-solar-power-are-left-in-the-shade

Price often condenses information and provides clarity. For a while, solar/wind proponents have operated with two simultaneous but generally conflicting narratives. -One narrative is that solar/wind are more environmentally friendly and should be subsidized. To the extent that they don't grow sufficiently fast, it's because we're not doing enough to artificially boost their adoption. -The other narrative is continually remind how cheap solar/wind have become. Proponents will post charts/studies showing that solar/wind are cheaper than other types of energy, and that it "just makes sense now". In practice, a lot of caveats are often excluded. The thing is, price usually cuts through confusion on these types of matters. Especially price over a significant amount of time and space, rather than just price in a snapshot of time and locality. If solar/wind are indeed cheaper than other energy sources, why aren't they being built in place of others? Why isn't it a no-brainer for any megacorp to just install terawatts of them all over? For example, the percentage growth of solar power in India over the past 5-10 years is impressive, but in terms of raw numbers, way more coal power was brought online during that period than solar. The answer is often that they're *not actually* cheaper in an all-inclusive sense. And if they're not cheaper, why is that? The answer is often because they're more materially intensive, less durable, and not as environmentally friendly as many proponents argue, either. That cost (panels, turbines, batteries, maintenance, decommissioning, and replacement) is going somewhere, and usually quite materially. That's not to say that solar/wind don't have uses (they do), but their usage is often hamfisted into places where they're not the most economic choice, and where they are not the most economic choice, it's often because they're not necessarily the most environmental choice either. Price is often ignored or fudged in analysis, but it really does provide a powerful signal in aggregate that's worth paying attention to.